Multiscalar Framing: Comparing How Immigrant-Serving Organizations Challenge Immigration Enforcement Across States with Varied Migration Histories

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 19. Immigrant organizations

Abstract

In the United States, immigration enforcement through the “crimmigration” apparatus crosses borders and increasingly dominates public perceptions of migrants as criminal threats, shaping the landscapes immigrant-serving organizations navigate to advocate for migrants. We know less about how these dynamics play out in conservative political contexts like the South, where localized enforcement shocks may play out differently across states. This study investigates key temporal shocks of legal immigration enforcement in the South, comparing immigrant-serving organizations’ framing strategies across four states (North Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama). We use the “Immigrant Organizational Activity Database in the South (IOADS).” This dataset draws from 4665 organizational documents including press releases, reports, posters, and webpages across four states over a 20 year span (2000-2020). Our analysis shows enforcement events and institutional responses most strongly structure organizational framing in the new South. How then do immigrant-serving organizations in the new South frame and respond to federal immigration enforcement events, and how do those framings vary across state enforcement regimes? We identify a multiscalar relational process of framing wherein organizations orient strategic frames 1) towards geopolitics across borders that shape enforcement regimes in the U.S., 2) towards federal enforcement events and 3) their local consequences, including addressing harms to their local communities, local institutional pressures, and legal responses. This study contributes to comparative migration studies by integrating studies of comparative migration with comparative framing. This synthesized comparative approach helps to better explain how immigrant organizations negotiate and strategize around multiple scales of migration pathways and politics from across borders to federal enforcement to state contexts and local consequences. This study has implications for understanding not only how the enforcement against different migrant groups compares at the subnational level but also how immigrant-serving organizations strategize to resist them.

Authors

• Blanca A Ramirez, University of Texas-Austin

• Hajar Yazdiha, University of Southern California